As we work to bring even more value to our audience, we’ve made important changes for those who receive Ad Age with our compliments. As of November 15, 2016 we will no longer be offering full digital access to AdAge.com. However, we will continue to send you our industry-leading print issues focused on providing you with what you need to know to succeed.

If you’d like to continue your unlimited access to AdAge.com, we invite you to become a paid subscriber. Get the news, insights and tools that help you stay on top of what’s next.

I've loved using Trendrr as both a research tool and as an excuse to explore how culture and conversation is manufactured these days. (My favorite Trendrr-inspired riff of the year so far? "Greyson Chance, 12-year-old YouTube and Twitter Superstar: How He Really Happened.") Now Trendrr has rolled out a major upgrade -- they're calling it Trendrr v3 -- which I think will vastly expand its strategic value and utility to marketers and media people who need to track campaign/brand performance in the social-media space and beyond.

Mark Ghuneim

On the occasion of the launch of Trendrr v3, I spoke with Mark Ghuneim, the CEO of Wiredset, the digital agency that created Trendrr.
I sat down with Ghuneim at Wiredset HQ in Manhattan's Meatpacking District, where his staff of 20 create cutting-edge digital campaigns for clients including Bravo, Calvin Klein (Coty), Comedy Central, HarperCollins, Hugo Boss (P&G), MTV, Oxygen and Sony Pictures Television. What follows is an edited and compressed version of a much longer conversation.

Simon Dumenco: You've been at this awhile. Wiredset
has existed as a digital agency since 2004 -- pre-Twitter,
pre-Facebook! -- and you were at Sony Music [as VP of Digital
Marketing] before that. Talk to me about the idea of
digital/engagement marketing, like, a decade ago, vs. now. What's
changed -- other than everything?

Mark Ghuneim: When I was at Sony, I remember -- I
want to say this was around 2000 -- I had to go down to a theater in
TriBeCa to watch a demo of an interactive movie. Kevin Seal, the old
MTV VJ, was in it and what we were doing in our seats was pushing
buttons to change the plotline. That was kind of the idea of
interactive TV/film at the time and I remember thinking, "Wow, this
doesn't scale. They have to shoot five endings for every scene?" Also,
I didn't want to be making those decisions; I wanted to be
passive in that particular case, when I went to a movie
theater.

Eventually, though, we started to see the correlation between
television and the live web, as the real-time web began to emerge. And
that was not only exciting, but sort of obvious, because just go back
to what TV has always been about: friends and families sitting in the
living room, talking about TV. And really the only thing that's
changed is now the living room is the entire world, right? It's the
same type of interactivity: You're talking about what's taking place
in front of you.

From a marketing perspective, the important thing is figuring out when
consumers want to be passive and when they want to be active. How do
you use that? How do you activate consumers? Can it affect the primary
business -- you know, gross ratings points, if you're a broadcaster?
And can you use what we call "social tune-in" to communicate the value
of the network or the show off-network?

Dumenco: "Social tune-in" -- I like that. You know,
in deconstructing trends for the weekly Trendrr charticle, I've
written a lot about how the real-time web is often just basically
about what's happening, right now, or very recently, in old-school
media. Twitter a lot of time is all about what's on TV right now, or
last night.

Ghuneim: It's gone from "must-see TV" to "must-tweet
TV," but it's still just about shared experiences, and I think that's
really a basic human behavior.

Dumenco: It's deeply human.

Ghuneim: This is going to sound really cornball, but,
you know, I only want to break emotional ground. When I was at Sony, I
was there for a specific reason: because music breaks emotional
ground. People at live shows throwing themselves off stages, dancing
like they're on fire -- music resonates. Watching how
broadcast resonates in real time -- as we look at the real-time data,
the conversation is about emotional reactions. When you think of a
tweet as "resonant" -- how many people liked it, retweeted it,
interacted with it in some way -- I always view that as, like, a
helium balloon that you're keeping in the air. How long did that tweet
stay in the ecosystem? Tweets at their best are conversations, they're
best when they break emotional ground.

Digital marketing is about understanding the difference between the
passive side of engagement and the really immersive, active side of
engagement. There's a boatload of space between those two things, and
data plays very well into that.

Dumenco: You work with a lot of broadcast clients.
Give me an example of data helping a broadcaster get a grip on the
active side of engagement.

Ghuneim: We've worked with MTV over the last two
years on their Video Music Awards. If you have the data and you know
that 80,000 people are going to be on Twitter talking about the show
when it's on, you have a very real opportunity to feed that ecosystem
to drive social tune-in. So as real-time marketers, we'd start to
build awareness and start to build in the mechanics of engagement a
couple of days before a show starts. As you monitor the conversation,
you're able to see, like, OK, X amount of people -- a particular
subset -- are asking a question. How do we answer that en masse? How
do you get the information out most efficiently? So we've developed
ways to parse the stream for context, location, sentiment and
influence, focusing our marketing and time on the most valuable areas
as they happen. What knocks me off my chair is learning who is
actually driving the conversation, controlling the conversation. It's
a subset of a subset.

The core Wiredset crew on West 13th Street in Manhattan's Meatpacking District.
Dumenco: So you've got this flood of data and you're
filtering it down and further down and further down to figure out the
core -- where the memes, the conversational threads, really gain
traction.

Ghuneim: Exactly. You know, it's never been about
just having the data -- there's too much data, right? It's
understanding how not to abuse it, how not to get run over by it.
Like, you could behavioral-target with, like, a scalpel and a laser
right now, but does it need to be that incisive? If you
really understanding who's most influential around a subject, then you
can begin to optimize messaging; like, you can figure out the best way
to target future advertisements. It's also about knowing when to
message -- when to listen and when to talk.

Dumenco: Talk to me about listening to
negative talk as a marketer. Because while a lot of brands
are thrilled to engage in conversation with quote-unquote
fans, they can freeze up when non-fans start speaking up on
Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Ghuneim: You know, I think everything I learned about
social media happened before social media. Looking back to my days of
what I did before Wiredset, I remember one particular situation that
helped me hone my crisis-management thinking. I put up one of the
first rock-and-roll bulletin boards at the time. Which tells you that
I'm old, but, you know. [laughs]

Dumenco: When was this?

Ghuneim: It was probably '94, '95. I was working with
Toad the Wet Sprocket, the band. Toad wanted to really engage with
their fan base, so the net comes about, they understand the
importance, we're doing some really fun stuff with them, and we get to
deploy the first bulletin-board software. We put up a forum for Toad
the Wet Sprocket, and the first post is, "You guys totally suck." I
get a call from the manager and the head of the label and the product
manager and the head of the fan club and they're all, like, "Take it
down, take it down, take it down, oh my God, take it down!" And I
said, "OK, OK, OK, OK," hung up the phone, absolutely didn't take
anything down, and then sat back and watched the band's fans trash
that post down to dirt. They made that guy go away and in doing so
really started to form the basis of a community.

Now we're in the same place. I'm a brand -- did that person just say
something that's really damaging to my brand? Well, same thing: Should
I wait and sit back and see what's going to happen, or should I act
immediately? These same decisions are being made now. Sometimes you
don't want your first decision to be an act of censorship, because
from there the second and third decisions and so on can just get worse
and worse and worse. Rapid-response brand management today is about
understanding how to communicate and how to give your brand advocates
an opportunity vs. worrying about the detractors all the time.

Dumenco: It strikes me that you're in a great
position working with entertainment and broadcast people, because
they've understood for decades a kind of almost slow-motion real-time
marketing. Like, a label would watch their artist perform on "Saturday
Night Live" and then breathlessly wait for the Billboard charts -- and
the retail-scan numbers, when SoundScan came about. Then it became
about even more instantaneous metrics: site visits, MySpace song
streams, iTunes downloads, Amazon sales rank, Twitter buzz, etc.

Ghuneim: The window has just gotten smaller. That's
where Trendrr came from -- we needed more fine-tuned tools to
understand what was happening in the marketplace to communicate to our
clients.

Dumenco: And then Trendrr took on a life of its own.

Ghuneim: Yeah. I wanted to be an agency that builds
things -- that makes beautiful things, ultimately. We actually started
Trendrr, which we called Infofilter at first, with two data sources:
Delicious and Flickr. We took a big, big risk in building out a
product at that time and continuing to build it assuming that the net
would open up and data would open up, and sure enough, it did.
Delicious and Flickr were among the first to open up, but then slowly
things started to kick into place.

Dumenco: What would you learn from Flickr? Would it
be people posting pictures that they took at concerts for band
"brands" you were monitoring?

Ghuneim: It showed how active the audience was so,
yes, you could look the next day and see events driving actions: the
taking of a photo, the conversation around that photo. It was a
brand-imaging tool: This is what's said about your brand now.
You might have the most sophisticated branding strategies in the
world, but if people do a Google search or a Flickr search and see a
particular conversation about your brand, well, in that moment, that's
what your branding is!

Dumenco: And now you've got dozens of data sources
feeding Trendrr. Which reminds me why I'm talking to you in the first
place: the relaunch of Trendrr, aka Trendrr v3. Beyond the fact that
Trendrr now also incorporates additional feeds like location-based
data from Foursquare and Gowalla, what's different?

Ghuneim: The streamlined workflow and feature
selection of Trendrr v3 is what sets it apart from the previous
version. Trendrr enables marketers to listen, measure and respond to
the conversation about a brand, service or product. The "listen" layer
enables users to search, curate and save real-time conversation
streams. The "measure" layer enables users to measure conversation and
activity across Twitter, blogs, news, social networks, search, sales
and location-based services, addressing a shift to what we call "swarm
consumer behavior." The "response" layer enables users to communicate
and market directly from their dashboard.

Dumenco: You've added Facebook data too, right?

Ghuneim: Yeah, Facebook "likes" and shares.

Dumenco: I know some marketers and media people would
be blissed-out to have all that data at their fingertips, and others
would freak out at the thought of it, as in, Not more data! I'm
already swimming in too much data!

Ghuneim: The point of Trendrr is to structure and
contextualize large, otherwise incomprehensible data sets in real-time
by organizing sources into individual management dashboards. Each
dashboard has been developed and designed to provide the user with
simple, actionable intelligence. Our data is actionable because it can
be viewed in both real-time, as it's processed, or over time, which
provides a historical perspective.

Dumenco: Do you ever get sick of any of the data
yourself? Like, have you discarded any data streams because you
figured out that they really don't tell you that much?

Ghuneim: Yeah, you can get too mired in the
not-important ones. Like, yes, I can count the number of comments on a
video on You Tube. How actionable that is right now? Not sure.

Dumenco: I think it probably just means too many
people have too much time on their hands.

Ghuneim: [Laughs] We don't hold it against them.

~ ~ ~

Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for
Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.